Overview
- Lee County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Tickal on Dec. 22 vacated Brooke Shoemaker’s 2020 conviction and ruled that new evidence could have led jurors to a different verdict.
- Tickal ordered a new trial after defense experts pointed to placental infection, and possibly a genetic abnormality, as the likely cause of the 2017 stillbirth.
- Shoemaker had received an 18-year sentence for chemical endangerment of a child resulting in death and has served about five years.
- The state medical examiner detected methamphetamine in the fetus’ bloodstream but listed the cause of death as undetermined, and prosecutors argue the defense evidence is merely a new interpretation.
- Prosecutors have appealed to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, and advocacy group Pregnancy Justice notes Alabama has pursued 192 pregnancy-related prosecutions in the two years after Dobbs.